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Dividends, Noncontractibility, and Corporate Law

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Dividends, Noncontractibility, and Corporate Law University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1997 Dividends, Noncontractibility, and Corporate Law William W. Bratton University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Business Organizations Law Commons, Economic Theory Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Securities Law Commons, and the Work, Economy and Organizations Commons Repository Citation Bratton, William W., "Dividends, Noncontractibility, and Corporate Law" (1997). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 880. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/880 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DIVIDENDS, NONCONTRACTIBILITY, AND CORPORATE LAW William W. Bratton* INTRODUCTION It is the custom to hold out Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway as a real world reproach to the arrogance of advocates of financial economic theory. I am in sympathy with this custom. But this Article will make no such reproach, even though it consid­ ers a practice of Buffett and Berkshire in the context of a body of financial economics. The subject practice is Berkshire's anomalous policy of paying no dividends.1 The subject economic models, which will be collectively referred to as the "first principles variant of incomplete contracts theory," apply the theory of incomplete contracts to the problem of optimal capital structure. In so doing, these models create no occasion for a real world reproach. They show that financial economics, like Berkshire Hathaway itself, has grown and become more complex as the years have passed. Gone are the first-best certainties and simplifications characteristic of first-generation blockbusters like the capital asset pricing model, the efficient capital market hypothesis, and the irrelevance theory of capital structure. These second-generation exercises remit us to a second-best world-a world that, although highly stylized, would at least be recognizable to Benjamin Graham and David Dodd.2 Some strong parallels to the first-generation economics of op­ timal capital structure nonetheless persist in this second-genera­ tion, second-best world. Here, as there, debt solves certain governance problems attending equity control, and the issuance of equity in turn solves certain problems attending the incurrence of debt. But here, unlike there, conditions of uncertainty render un- ·· Professor of Law and Governor Woodrow Wilson Scholar. Rutgers School of Law­ Newark. My thanks to Joe McCahery. David Carlson, and Dale Oesterle for their com­ ments on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks to my research assistant. Andrew \Vhite. I Be rkshire Hathaway has paid only one dividend since Warren Buffett gained control ol it in 1965. That diviclencl was I 0¢ a -.hare distributed in 1967. Later Buffett said that "h e must have been in the bathroom·· when the Board made the declaration. See RoGER. Low­ E01STEIN. BuFFETT: THE iVI."-.KI>-:G OF ,\N A;viFR.ICAN C.A.PIT..\LIST 130. 133 n.•:• ( 1995). 2 Benjamin Graham was Warren Buffett's mentor. See id. at 36-59. Gra ham coauthored a famous text on securi ty analysis with David Dodd. See genernllv BENJ.-\;..IJN GRAHA\1 ET AL.. SECURITY ANALYSIS: PRINCIPLES ,\NO TECHNIQUE (4th eel. 1962). 409 410 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 19:409 known and unknowable the precise and practical measure of the optimal mix of the two. The models described here reach this com­ mon-sensical result because they follow an economic theory of the firm that alters a number of assumptions made in first-generation economic models of agency relationships. The first-generation models remitted governance problems to corporate actors for con­ tractual solution, in many cases undaunted by the apparent ab­ sence of contractual technologies for dealing effectively with the problems they identified. They assumed, not unreasonably but perhaps not so safely, that suboptimal institutional conditions would create incentives to spur the development of new contrac­ tual solutions. And they deemed that the future would bring any necessary technical innovations, provided that no regulatory stum­ bling blocks cropped up to impede this progressive evolutionary process. In contrast, the incomplete contracts models suggest that in­ formation asymmetries-in particular problems of ex post observa­ tion and verification-structurally delimit the class subject matter suited to travel on this track of evolutionary improvement. This body of theory remits us to a second-best world for the purpose of identifying and explaining barriers that prevent the evolution of first-best corporate governance institutions. This does not negative the proposition that state intervention can be one such barrier.3 But, at the same time, the state's removal of itself does not neces­ sarily free transacting actors to cause institutions to evolve to the first-best ideal. It instead holds, first, that transacting actors can work such marketplace magic only to the extent that their subject matter is contractible. Second, it holds that contractibility cannot safely be assumed-the requisite transactional technologies may not yet exist; nor may they even be imaginable in the present state of things. And, third, it holds that corporate capital structure presents many such problems of noncontractibility. It accordingly predicts that the mandatory and contractual devices that vest and transfer corporate control will continue to constitute the central governance institution. By default, then, state intervention retains a place on this theory's list of possible means to the end of improv­ ing suboptimal governance conditions.4 3 For this view of history. see MARK J. RoE. STRONG MANAGERS. WEAK OvmERs: THE PouTIC";\L RooTs OF AiYIERICAN CoRPORATE fiNANCE (1994). 4 Sec Philippe Aghion & Benjamin Hermalin, Legal Resrricrions on Privaic Conrracts Con Enhance Efficiency. 6 J.L. EcoN. & 0RG. 381 (1990'1. 1997] DIVIDENDS 411 Thus postured, these incomplete contracts models offer no present template for an optimal real world governance regime even though they direct themselves to the business of articulating formu­ lae for optimal capital structures. To bring them to bear on divi­ dend and reinvestment policy, then, promises no wealth maximizing quick fix-contractual, mandatory, or otherwise. A pair of more limited objectives must suffice for this Article. First, the models will be used here to explain why dividend and reinvest­ ment policy has a history of chronic insusceptibility to easy regula­ tory improvement-contractual, mandatory, or otherwise. Second, the models will be used to appraise the three items on the standing menu of governance reform proposals respecting dividend and re­ investment policy-specifically, mandatory payout of earnings, in­ stitutional investor monitoring, and stepped-up disclosure requirements. This Article has three parts. Part I examines the dividend pol­ icy both of Berkshire Hathaway and of the companies in which it presently holds substantial common stock investments. It there turns out that the apparent puzzle presented by Berkshire's prac­ tice of total earnings retention is quickly solved with a reference to Graham and Dodd's classic work on security analysis. But it also turns out that Berkshire holds significant blocks of stock in firms that follow a more conventional payout pattern. A puzzle is en­ countered at that point, but not a puzzle usually connected to Berkshire Hathaway. It is instead the famous dividend puzzle of financial economics, along with the agency explanation favored in legal theory. Part II describes the approach to capital structure emerging in the incomplete contracts literature. The models teach, first, that intractable informational asymmetries prevent direct contractual solutions to the governance problem presented by dividend policy, and, second, that solutions can be structured only indirectly through the control transfer provisions built into corporate capital structures. This story echoes that of the standing agency explana­ tion of dividend policy, remitting attention to the disciplinary properties of debt for a means to counter the empire-building ten­ dencies of corporate managers. Unlike the agency explanation, this story does not purport to offer a complete solution to the prob­ lem of suboptimal earnings retention. It does, however, provide a powerful explanation for the continuing absence of a first-best so­ lution. Given conditions of uncertainty, it follows from the nature ' 1 412 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 19:409 of debt and equity that the precise measure of an optimal mix of two will remain unknown. Part III uses the incomplete contracts perspective to appraise three legal strategies for ameliorating the problem of suboptimal dividend and reinvestment policy. First, the recent proposal of a mandatory shareholder option to require payout of a pro rata share of earnings is examined.5 Incomplete contracts ideas expbin this strategy's intuitive appeal while simultaneously warning of sig­ nificant perverse effects. Second, the indirect solution to the prob­ lem promised by the
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